An unfortunate number of coincidences. The coincidences all ended up converging in Sans Serif Latin script, because a vertical line is a simple thing, and any simplification of glyphs can’t get any simpler than a | .

The letter I started as Phoenecian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yodh, which did not look like a |:

But by the time the Greeks were done with it, it did (from: Archaic Greek alphabets):

There was no number 1 or lowercase l back then to cause trouble.

The number 1 actually went a curious journey from Indian to Arabic to European numbers, as summarised in 1 (number):

So: ⼀ to १ to ۱ to 1.

Simplify the Devanagari or Roman serifed glyph, and you get the Arabic and Roman sans serif glyph: a vertical line. The vertical line ended up ambiguous in Arabic with alef, too: ا ۱.

The lowercase l did in fact emerge out of capital L, by shortening the bottom of the L in Rustic capitals. As you can see (source: History of the Latin alphabet), the history of <I> and <l> has been an attempt to fix the resulting ambiguity, including different sizing, serifs, and tittles. The distinction between capitals and lowercase was more pronounced in mediaeval script than after the invention of printing, so I/l wasn’t as much of a problem back then.

It’s not like Quora makes it possible to recover your most upvoted (and hence overrated) Quora answers. I can see that my most upvoted, by a factor of 5, were

• Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why was Richard White banned from Quora?
• Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why was Jimmy Liu (who changed his name to Jay Liu) banned? Is this because of name change? What do you think about it?

I am proud of those answers. But I don’t think I’m 5 times more proud of those answers, than I am of the questions where I try to work out a historical linguistic puzzle from first principles…

I think it puts me in a strange uncomfortable place.

On the one hand, I am a libertarian in many things; I am more libertarian, certainly, than my fellow Australian latte-sippers (as opposed to American latte-sippers). And my position is that Bernardi’s dilution is right: there is a difference of threshold between “intimidate, humiliate, vilify” and “offend and insult”, and that threshold does have a chilling effect.

On the other hand, I’m a moderately Libertarian Leftist; not a liberal or a Randian Libertarian. I loathe all proponents of the dilution of 18C, with the exception of Leyonhjelm, who may be a nutjob, but is at least a principled nutjob. My blood boils whenever Andrew Fricking Bolt is mentioned in any context; and “white-skinned Aboriginals” or “Ban the burka” is not the kind of discourse I find worth defending. Bernardi is our very own Ted Cruz. The Dad’s Army backbench supporting this is who’s holding Turnbull—and in many ways, our country—back from joining the 21st century.

InB4 David Stewart…

Now that I’ve seen OP’s context:

If you’re referring to modern day cars, you don’t want the modern Greek word for automobile (autokineton), which is too clunky. Harma, -atos for chariot is OK, but the Modern Greek colloquial term for car is amaxi, which derives from hamaxa “wagon”. So maybe also hamaxanthrope.

The modern generic term for vehicle is ochema, -atos; originally that was a mule-car, and it was what a war car, a harma, was not (horse vs mule). But by post-Classical Greek, it was the generic term; there’s a 2nd century AD inscription translating the praefectus vehiculorum as eparchos ochematon.

So ochematanthrope.

Or, I dunno, just Transformer. 🙂

My answer is the same as Philip Newton’s, which is the same as KP Wee’s. I do have photos of me, but whenever asked for an avatar, I rummage in Spotlight for “Nick Jpg”, which is rather slimmer pickings.

My avatar picture, courtesy of my wife, is me doing something uncharacteristic. Lying down in the park and taking in the sun. It’s a memento temperare: a reminder to myself to keep it cool…

You’ve managed to stumble on one of the most interesting questions in the philosophy of the Mind: Qualia.

It’s a fiercely debated question, with axiomatically different answers. Have fun!

Stephen E. Ambrose wrote three volumes of biography on Nixon. At the start of his undertaking, he loathed Nixon, like most academics that had lived through Watergate. His wife, as it happened, was a Nixon supporter. By the end of the three volumes, they had swapped: Ambrose had developed a grudging respect for Nixon, his wife had come to loathe him.

You can look at the same data and come away with different conclusions, of course. Ambrose thought what Nixon was trying to do with foreign policy was truly visionary, if at times conflicted. Robert Dallek, in his Nixon and Kissinger, describes their foreign policy as attention-seeking flim flam.

Like David Goure said:

In some ways, Richard Nixon is such an amazing character study. Brilliant but with incredible flaws of an almost literary character.

A lot of people out there in TV Land have grudging respect for Frank Underwood. And Nixon was a far more effective president.

Questionable UX Orchestration, Regressively Administered.

Assuming I understood your A2A, Anon (and I’m not sure I did understand “How do i bend those verbs”),

• I am being (which, as a verb tense of be, is redundant, and you will only hear it as an auxiliary)
• I am becoming
• I am beginning

… Have I missed something?

Originally Answered:

Have you ever caught someone talking about you in another language?

A2A. How many gajillion squintillion answers are there here already? No, not reading the thread.

OK, answering to be neighbourly, Sofia Mouratidis.

I was in Crete. I was not on my nice, cosy familiar native easternmost neck of the island, where the people are gentle and placid, and the native instrument is the violin and not the Cretan lyra, and the villagers are so laid back, they got Italians to occupy them during WWII instead of Germans.

No. I was 14 km south of Iraklio, visiting the birthplace of Nikos Kazantzakis. The birthplace of Kazantzakis is now called Myrtia: myrtle-tree.

It wasn’t called Myrtia when Kazantzakis was born. It was called Varvari: Barbarians. (Or Berbers, if you prefer.)

And as far as I’m concerned, it still is. I was waiting in the village cafe for transport back out to Iraklio. There was a sign in the cafe.

The sign said:

GUNFIRE STRICTLY FORBIDDEN.

There’s two more things we don’t do around Sitia. One is change the pronunciation of original [tj] to [θj]. So the Venetian balota “bullet” (cf. Italian pallottola) + the suffix –ja, meaning a blow or shot of something, would be pronounced balotja in Sitia. In the rest of the island, it is pronounced baloθja.

The second thing we don’t do around Sitia is use the word balotja. Because we in Sitia do not think that SHOOTING GUNS IN THE AIR IN A CONFINED SPACE, to let people know you’re having a good time, IS A PARTICULARLY SMART THING TO DO.

Like I said. Barbarians.

Oh, where was I? I had to wait a couple of hours in the cafe over at Varvari, underneath the GUNFIRE STRICTLY FORBIDDEN sign, because the local cab driver had gone over to the next village, to repair his mother-in-law’s chicken coop.

I had some rather nice chops while waiting. And I wrote a Klingon sonnet.

Eventually the staff shift changed, and I heard some say on the handover, “the foreigner over there is waiting for a cab to take him back to Iraklio.”

(Actually, given where I was, I wouldn’t be surprised if he used one of the older names of Iraklio. Like Kastro. Or Candia. Or Chandax. Or Knossos.)

*Sheepishly and very Australianly puts his hand up*

“Not… a foreigner, actually.”

… In retrospect, as a Sitiakos in Varvari: yes. Yes I was.